We finalized our house rulebook for The Enemy Within Campaign.
We have made some very common sense simplifications to the rules: no characteristic fortune dice bloat, no socketing, fortune dice can be used whenever you want (even after a roll), social actions with perform stunt, and plenty of character gen options.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/167876/WFRP3%20HAFNER%20Houserules%20v10%20The%20Enemy%20Within.pdf
Comments and questions on implementation are welcome.
jh
It is interesting to know that we are having similar worries with the same aspects of the game. Probably other people have them also.
I started treating chaos stars as comets in the sense that you can swap them for a challenge.
Cheers,
Yepes
As mentioned in other thread - the link does not work…
fixed it!
jh
Link broken again
Sad panda.
fixed it!
jh
Here is the latest and greatest: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/167876/wfrp%20pix/WFRP3%20HAFNER%20Houserules%20v10%20The%20Enemy%20Within.pdf
fortune dice can be used whenever you want (even after a roll),
I'm curious, how well has that worked out for you and your group?
I tried it with my group for several sessions, hoping it would inspire my players to spend more fortune points and be more epic/cinematic, and it actually had the opposite effect. In the 3 or 4 sessions we used that house-rule, I believe a single fortune point got spent once. Again and again the players would look at the results sitting in front of them, and realize that they'd need 2 more successes (or boons) to actually make a meaningful change, so they'd decide it wasn't worth it. After we reverted to the default rules, they started spending them again. YMMV, and if so I'd love to hear about it.
They burn through Fortune Points like quicksilver and mostly in comedic ways..hopefully one of my players will be along to explain...
Its funny how we will hang on the edge of our seats and cheer and jeer at the mounting tension.
I don't look at it for anything heroic, but my players WILL attempt heroic things and tend not to save any hero points (except for the fop, who just points out the window of the carriage, "Hey, pisssstolier', could you go kill that gentleman over there? He's blocking my view of the window to the hat shop.")
..our party tension meter runs pretty high even though we don't officially use a party sheet (in fact, we just randomly roll for one at the beginning of the session just to set the tone of the session). Then we roll a d5, add 5 and that's where the party tension meter starts.
If I can ever find a place to upload our sessions to a podcast, I'm sure people would be quite perplexed (and probably offended) at how we actually play this game
jh
fortune dice can be used whenever you want (even after a roll),
I'm curious, how well has that worked out for you and your group?....
As Emirikol mentions we use the fortune dice at will either before or after a given check. Adding my own perspective, we do inevitably use them up at some point during the evening. Of course me and my fellow PCs are convinced that fortune dice are a scam invented by evil GMs. Even though they appear to have Sigmar's hammer on two sides, they sure as heck never come up when you need them too!
Trying to get that ONE SUCCESS with a fortune die can be pretty funny. Another player in our group--about 10 minutes into the evening's session--burned all four dice trying to avoid (of all things) being bitten by a mosquito. He failed of course.
I really like the "post-roll" option of using the fortune die. Sometimes because of the sounds/reactions to rolls I think our gaming table better belongs on the strip in Vegas.
Edited by Eradico PravusThat's what I expected it to do for us, but it always backfired. Cool that it performs as intended at your table.
As Eradico mentions, our attempts at gaining a success on Fortune dice is pure comedy. We have a higher chance of gaining a Chaos star than a success. Go figure.
But we do like the pre or post option. It's not like they work in our favor anyway...
As I am planning on running TEW, I am curious on the house rules but the file is still inaccessible.
See if that works better.
jh
Fortune and Misfortune dice are obviously more effective in Star Wars (boost and setback dice). I'll put sticker on my warhammer dice so as to copy the starwars' dice.
Fortune :
add one double boon on an empty side
add one boon to a success side
misfortune
addone one bane on a empty side
That would effectively raise the success rates even higher though. You planning on reducing/changing the dice to emulate EotE because of what reason? Neil Foster has been looking into changing the dice for his purposes, perhaps he could fill you in more on the exact statistics if that's why.
Personally, I like the comedy that ensues with use of fortune dice (we use ours AFTER the roll at-will). Perhaps if you're having players use them prior to the roll, the increased success chance may be more desirable for players who think that 86%success is too low
Finding that sweet spot for a group is crucial. I have one player in our Pathfinder group who does nothing but gripe because he thinks that 75% is too low, yet he complains that WFRP3 is too high. He'd really crap his diapers if he saw how high EotE goes! (and this is part of the reason why I have two gaming groups).
It is a way to cut down on the number of dice, but I actually kind of like using the dice. It was easy enough to pull one or two off by getting rid of the unbalanced characteristic fortune dice advances to make it perfect for my tastes. I think for some, just having enough dice is the issue.
For a lower dice amount, d20 is always an option and it is a much more playtested system than EotE. There, you only have to use two (like old editions of Warhammer), but the success rates are much lower. You would have to start players out at +5 to the standard numbers there to equal EotE or WFRP's "never-miss" systems. Cthulhu dice is the max though if you like to use symbols, but don't want lots of dice. There, you only have one
Stickers are the way to go though. Glorian Underhill had a dice page of dice stickers he was using if you need some that
jh
Edited by Emirikol
See if that works better.
jh
Nope :-)